The news of Steve’s death were expected but still came as a shock for everybody. Like if the guy was holding on for one last product launch.

Lots of people wrote extensive, thoughtful and well written eulogies. I will just remark what most impressed me about Steve Jobs, he was a master of simplicity. Simplicity is hard, everyone who tries to write software knows this. For me simplicity is really hard, I’m a crufter so seeing someone churn out products by removing, not adding, features is like magic.

Steve came back from NeXT to Apple, brought UNIX and built an aesthetic and simple UI around it. Then he did the same to the mp3 player and to the smart phone. My first analysis of the iPhone was focused on what it lacked, not what it had. It sounded pretty foolish as soon as iPhones started filtering into people’s hands and it became obvious it wasn’t missing anything. Everything that couldn’t be made perfect was removed. Deliberately. That kind of focus and courage is unique.

New Kindles, including a $200 colour android based tablet that will totally corner that segment. Even if you try to argue the iPad as some competition in the $600 range, have you looked at $200-$300 android tablets ? So the Kindle Fire will be a tool for a) buy more stuff from Amazon; b) let Amazon look at all your web traffic with Silk’s accelerated mode which works just like Opera Mini but in Amazon’s cloud. Having said that I can’t wait to get one.

PlayBook is now $300 following the successful footsteps of the TouchPad. That is of course cause people noticed the Kindle Fire is basically the same hardware as the PlayBook and costs a lot less. And probably lets you read your email.

Intel drops MeeGo and merges it with something else thats backed by someone. It’s not like anyone really cares at this point.

ACTA was signed this weekend. This is the product of current Western democracy, an international treaty written by private companies, pushed by unelected government officials, hidden and lied about to the general public. The icing on the cake is USA, the country pushing ACTA and trying to make it automatically national law is backing away from it and making it non binding for them as making it a treaty would require passing it through the Senate where it would most likely fail. So the rest of us are just
cannucks.